Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison

by Michael Daly

  “It is true that the elephant was a more snowy white on Monday than at any other time of the week, although sometimes the skin had been spotted and stained on Saturday,” the Forepaugh aide later wrote.

  In Chicago, Forepaugh got word that the heir apparent to the Siamese throne was visiting the city while on a tour of America. Forepaugh invited him and his entourage to see the show and inspect the white elephant.

  “The royal person came, accompanied by other dignitaries, looked the beast over and muttered to the interpreter something which was apparently not complimentary,” the aide recalled. “The press agent saw to it, however, that the newspapers said that the prince had declared the animal the genuine article.”

  The prince might have been more impressed by the unpainted elephants, which were described by the show’s “courier,” or promotional pamphlet, as a “quarter of 100 PERFORMING ELEPHANTS! . . . 25 SAGACIOUS SCHOLASTIC ELEPHANTS. . . . A HALF-MILLION DOLLAR FEATURE THAT NO EXHIBITION IN THE WORLD CAN DUPLICATE!” The elephants included the giant said to be so fond of Topsy, the counterpart of Barnum’s Jumbo, the one Forepaugh’s courier called “THE KING OF ALL MASTODONS, THE LEVIATHAN MONSTER ELEPHANT ‘BOLIVAR.’”

  “THE GREATEST HERD OF TRAINED MASTODONS THE WORLD EVER SAW,” the courier promised. “They all appear in Living Pyramids! Elephantine dances! Military evolutions! Play upon musical instruments! Stand upon their heads! Pick up needles and pins! Uncork bottles and drink their contents! Engage in racing! Walk, posture and balance upon the Tight Rope.”

  The elephants had indeed been trained to do all this and more, though the tightrope was really an iron beam with a halved hawser affixed along the side. The elephants had been taught to strike a drum, bells, a cymbal, a xylophone, and the keys of an organ as well as pull the slide of a trombone while a “conductor” waved a baton with her trunk. Topsy was among them and their faraway birth was now a selling point, presented as a mark of how far their training had taken them.

  “ADAM FOREPAUGH, JR.’S JUNGLE BORN BAND OF MASSIVE MUSICIANS . . . THE WONDER & MARVEL OF THE AGE . . . THEY DO EVERYTHING BUT TALK.”

  The elder Forepaugh made a half-million-dollar pledge in the courier.

  “The entire Herd, valued at the princely sum of $500,000, is introduced and performed by my son Adam Forepaugh, Jr., and I am ready to forfeit the worth of this great and costly Herd of Elephants, if his equal as an animal educator and trainer of elephants can be produced.”

  As both Forepaughs well knew, two men who were much more than young Adam’s equal had actually taught the elephants most of their present tricks. Every performance continued to be largely a demonstration of the power of patient kindness and unflagging focus as conceived by Stewart Craven and elaborated by Eph Thompson.

  “After a trick is once learned, it is never forgotten,” Thompson would later say. “Ten years afterward, [an elephant] will go through the performance without a hitch.”

  The newer tricks were almost certainly the work of Thompson’s own particular genius. His great-grandson has no doubt that Thompson actually shared Craven’s view.

  “He used kindness rather than cruelty and it seems to have worked,” the great-grandson, Ray Perkin, would later say.

  The results almost lived up to the courier’s hype. The enforced secrecy of the training barn allowed young Forepaugh to take the bows.

  “Forepaugh took all the credit,” Perkin would add.

  One of the show’s hands would later offer a glimpse of the truth to the Lewiston Evening Journal of Maine, adding that even with Thompson’s benign and understanding approach, the elephants were subject to young Forepaugh’s stringencies.

  “There was ‘Nigger Eph,’ who was always successful in handling the animals,” the hand told the newspaper. “Addie Forepaugh, son of Adam, was one of the most brutal men ever with a circus. . . . He handled his fork [bull hook] loosely, and often jabbed the animals needlessly.”

  The dichotomy became embodied in the big elephant Charley, who was described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as “perhaps the most vicious and violent and, at times, docile and affectionate elephant in captivity.”

  Along with the jabbing of young Forepaugh’s “fork” came the perpetual and harrowing ordeal of being on the road. Such stress classically causes elephants to exhibit what is known as stereotypic behavior: repetitively rocking back and forth, swinging the trunk, bobbing the head, shuffling the feet. This phenomenon was apparently what had led the ancient Roman naturalist Pliny the elder to imagine that an elephant who had been severely punished for not performing a trick during the day practiced on his own that night. Nearly two millennia later, Thompson used the rhythms of these stress-induced stereotypies to teach the elephants to dance “quadrilles” in groups of four, with Topsy among them. The crowds marveled at the way the elephants moved to the music, though in truth the band was playing to the elephants’ movements. The credit of course continued to go to the younger Forepaugh.

  In the meantime, the elder Forepaugh had suddenly welcomed any opportunity to test the Light of Asia with trials by water, noting that the elephant’s whiteness was undimmed despite vigorous rubbing and scrubbing.

  “Suspicious onlookers sometimes said something about waterproof paint,” the Forepaugh aide would recall.

  The paint could not have been any less toxic than the whitewash. But the elder Forepaugh figured he had on hand a number of similarly sized elephants to become the new Light of Asia should the present one succumb to the constant whitening, with nobody being the wiser. The designated fill-ins included Topsy, despite her distinctive broken tail. She was spared the torment of perpetual repainting by the genuinely remarkable performance that she and the other unpainted elephants were now putting on twice a day. This actual marvel raised the question of why Forepaugh even needed a fraud, especially as the public’s interest in the white elephant began to fade despite the waterproof whiteness.

  A reporter in Syracuse, New York, wrote, “Adam Forepaugh has a white elephant on his hands,” adding that the crowd was “sorely disappointed in the beast” and that the Light of Asia constituted an embarrassment in an otherwise excellent circus.

  “The early death of this mooted monster would be a godsend to the show,” the reporter suggested.

  A month after the close of the 1884 season, the elder Forepaugh announced to the world that his Light of Asia had died at the show’s winter quarters. Forepaugh reported that the elephant had caught a chill the previous week, when the keeper, apparently meaning Thompson, had carelessly left a window open overnight. Forepaugh said he had administered every medicine that seemed appropriate, but the elephant’s condition only worsened, until it breathed its last.

  “I will never buy another white elephant,” the elder Forepaugh declared. “The people didn’t appreciate the one I had.”

  On being told that the Light of Asia had died, Barnum replied, “More likely un-dyed.”

  THIRTEEN

  Eph’s Escape,

  Pickpockets, and

  Pink Lemonade

  The 1885 season brought a new Forepaugh attraction, named after a world-famous prizefighter.

  “A dark, natural beast, in form much resembling the white elephant, appeared as ‘John L. Sullivan,’ the boxing elephant,” recalled a Forepaugh press agent named W. C. Thompson, who was not related to the trainer. “He wore a glove on the end of his trunk and swung gently at ‘Eph’ Thompson, a colored trainer.”

  A newspaper spoke of the “boxing match between elephantine pugilist Sullivan and his trainer, Eph Thompson.” The glove-tipped trunk was described as “a very lively and effective battering ram that makes a cyclone-sweep without much regard for the region of the belt.” Eph Thompson was not described by his race, seemingly for the first time. He also got some actual credit as the trainer, though likely only because the younger Forepaugh would neve
r have subjected himself to a role so close to that of a clown. The crown prince of the show could hardly be seen being struck below the belt by some elephant.

  The boxing act thus allowed Eph Thompson to offer a first public glimpse of his genius. And, as the dancer Juba had already discovered, Europeans were more open to judging people of color not by their race but by their talents. The Europeans who now took notice of Thompson included Carl Hagenbeck of Hamburg, a showman as well as an animal dealer. Hagenbeck recognized who was really behind the success of the herd and hired Thompson away from Forepaugh to train six of his own elephants. Thompson subsequently appeared in Europe with Hagenbeck’s circus and others, becoming a continental sensation, to pachyderms what Josephine Baker would be to dance. He soon had his own show and his own elephants, one walking a tightrope while two others held it taut. He taught an Asian elephant named Mary to somersault down a ramp.

  Without the knowing and gentling hand of the true genius they had consigned to the shadows for so long, Forepaugh and his son found some of their elephants increasingly difficult to manage. Several were kept chained as too ill tempered to be in the parades. These “uglies” ate just as much as the others and Forepaugh was becoming even more aware of costs as the resumed competition with Barnum proved anew that even bloodless wars can be onerously expensive.

  Louis Cooke, his new general agent, representing Forepaugh in contracts and business arrangements, later wrote, “My engagement with the new show began at the close of the season, just after the famous ‘White Elephant War’ that had been so disastrous to the big concerns because of the extraordinary expense of the fight as well as its demoralizing effect upon the confidence of the amusement loving public.”

  Cooke said of this revived rivalry between Forepaugh and Barnum, “Extraordinary salaries were offered and paid for agents, performers and everything else that might possibly be of advantage to either concern. Heated arguments often arose. Hostile sentiment prevailed. Fabulous prices were demanded and paid. Rivalry ran rampant.”

  Cooke noted that Forepaugh “was ambitious not only to have a show equal to any in existence, but, as he expressed it, to ‘get even with Barnum.’”

  The elder Forepaugh could have expected at least to match his rival had Barnum continued to ballyhoo his circus as “The Greatest Show on Earth.” But with Barnum and the newspapers now calling it “The Great Moral Show,” Forepaugh was hard pressed to compete. The problem was that this description had some justification. Barnum abstained from the Forepaugh ploy of keeping the ticket wagon closed until the last minute so the scalpers in the show’s employ could fleece an extra dime out of anxious patrons, this followed by short-changing the more patient ones once the wagon was open. Barnum also refused to allow thieves and swindlers to operate in exchange for a cut. He actively and forcefully chased them away to such effect that a patron could actually attend the show without being swindled and robbed.

  Worse for Forepaugh, the public as well as the press had begun to notice the difference. The Barnum operation was becoming known as a “Sunday School Show,” to distinguish it from those such as Forepaugh’s, which zestfully justified the circus business’s tawdry reputation. Forepaugh continued a working relationship with the swindlers and thieves who traveled with the show, even providing them with their own railroad car, aboard which they traveled in what one thief termed “royal style.” They were said to include twenty professional pickpockets headed by a fellow called Windy Dick, who paid Forepaugh $200 a day up front. A young pickpocket named George Arthur reputedly scored as many as 125 pocketbooks during a single-day stand, along with 100 watches. The watches were regularly shipped to a New York City jeweler in a soapbox along with the gang’s other pilfered baubles.

  During the parade that signaled the show’s arrival at a new locale, the pickpockets would disperse in the crowds, operating individually but ever ready to cover each other’s retreat. The best “graft” was to be found during a performance, when the thieves would deploy under the stands.

  “Every man, woman, and child was in reality at their mercy,” Arthur said in an interview after his retirement. “Many a woman who thought the safest place to carry valuables was in her stocking has come to grief.”

  The thieves were always happy when the swelter of summer turned the inside of the tent steamy.

  “Many a vest was wide open, watch hanging for the picking,” Arthur said.

  The pickpockets’ accomplices included the lads who roamed the stands selling peanuts and “pink lemonade,” the latter having been invented when a vendor named Pete Conklin found himself short of water during a rush of customers and grabbed a tub in which a woman bareback rider had been soaking a pair of pink tights. The recipe, recorded by his brother, Forepaugh show veteran George Conklin, was “a tub of water, with no particular squeamishness regarding its source, tartaric acid, some sugar, enough aniline dye to give it a rich pink, and for a finish some thin slices of lemon. The slices of lemon are known as ‘floaters,’ and any which are left in the tub at the close of a day’s business, together with those which have come back in the glasses, are carefully saved over for the next day’s use. In this way the same floaters may appear before the public a considerable number of times.”

  When a customer flashed significant cash while purchasing a glass of the concoction, the vendor would tip off Arthur or one of the other thieves. If a patron suddenly shouted he was being robbed and ran after the thief, various members of the show would contrive to block his way. A victim who chased a pickpocket through a tent flap and then tried to return was likely to find himself confronted by a canvasman and accused of trying to sneak in. The victim would then be ejected, unless he was willing and still able to pay again.

  “By this time, the grafter had gone,” Arthur noted. “Nine out of ten times he was inside working again.”

  Through such strategies, the pickpockets went five seasons without a single arrest. Forepaugh’s $200-a-day cut added up to a considerable sum, and he was a lover of even small sums. He continued the arrangement with Windy Dick even while retaining the famed Pinkerton Agency to accord at least the appearance of cleaning up. He made sure the newspapers got the story after a Pinkerton detective grabbed an interloping pickpocket called Oyster Jim, whose real sin was a failure to pay tribute. The band played the “Rogue’s March” as the prisoner was trotted around the hippodrome track to hoots and jeers from the audience. Jim called out for any lawyers in the audience, saying he intended to sue.

  “Whether I am a thief or not, they have no proof,” he declared.

  Along with his other worries, Forepaugh suffered a harrowing string of railroad accidents such as constituted a constant hazard for any circus that rode the rails. The convoy of three trains carrying the Forepaugh circus had a total of six wrecks that destroyed more than thirty cars in the course of the 1885 season. The elephants must have been shaken, if not traumatized, though none fared as badly as the prize of the Barnum show.

  On September 15, near the close of the 1885 season, Jumbo was struck and killed by a locomotive that roared into a rail yard in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada, while the circus was preparing to board another train to its next stand. Barnum concocted and some newspapers perpetuated a heart-wrenching tale that the great creature had perished attempting to save an elephant so small as to be named Tom Thumb. The truth seems to be that Jumbo was on the tracks when the locomotive suddenly appeared and the elephant tried in vain to outrun it. The locomotive was derailed by the collision.

  The loss had a surprisingly profound effect on the chief Barnum trainer, George Arstingstall, who had repeatedly voiced the view that elephants were treacherous beasts on whom any kindness was wasted. He now faced the fact that his greatness was tied to Jumbo and that without the giant elephant he was just a guy with a sharp stick. He suffered an emotional collapse that was said to have been intensified by the demise of another relationship, what was d
escribed as “an affair of the heart” with a woman. A Bridgeport cop later found him sprawled across railroad tracks in an apparent suicide attempt.

  Forepaugh still had big Bolivar. He also had a patriarchal advantage over his rival that, in his view, ultimately outweighed animal attractions of any kind.

  “I have a boy and Mr. Barnum has none,” Forepaugh declared. “My show will outlast his.”

  Forepaugh still could not outdo Barnum though he did now seize an opportunity to outmaneuver him.

  FOURTEEN

  The Tree of

  Knowledge and

  the Fearless Frogman

  On December 8, 1885, William Vanderbilt died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage. The plans to replace Madison Square Garden had yet to progress beyond the drawing stage, and the old structure passed into the stewardship of an agent for the family. An agent for Forepaugh soon after offered to lease the Garden not just for a week at the start of the circus season, as had been Barnum’s habit, but for a full six months. The Vanderbilt agent was either unaware of the nature of the late scion’s relationship with Barnum or of a mind that money came first. Forepaugh’s agent sealed the deal with five $1,000 bills before Barnum could get wind of it.

  “I’m afraid it will kill Barnum,” Forepaugh rejoiced.

  Barnum had his agents inquire about a sublease and he could not have been surprised when Forepaugh rebuffed them. Barnum then threatened to open up at another Manhattan venue at the same time Forepaugh was opening at the Garden.

  “Mr. Forepaugh hoped [he] would,” the New York Times reported. “He liked circuses and would come and see it. He had a spare hyena to lend them if they ran short.”

  Bravado aside, Forepaugh had to realize that Barnum was capable of upstaging him even though his own circus now included a Wild West show. Forepaugh was also anxious for financial reasons to end the rivalry. He proposed that the two open together at the Garden. Barnum had little choice but to agree.